Neeva, a startup competing with Google in the search business, has announced that it is shutting down its search engine and switching its focus and resources toward artificial intelligence(AI) as the technology becomes more lucrative in the tech industry.
The Search Engine Battle
The startup, which was founded by former Googlers Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan in 2019, had built what people believed was the search engine that posed a challenge to Google’s own search engine.
However, in a blog post announcing the winding down of the search engine’s operations, Neeva’s founders said, “Building search engines is hard. It is even harder to do with a tiny team of 50 people who are up against entrenched organizations with endless resources.”
“We overcame these obstacles and built a search stack from the ground up, running a crawl that fetched petabytes of information from the web and used that to power an independent search stack,” they added.
It is with heavy hearts we announce https://t.co/aZwoDBEZq0 will shut down over the next few weeks.
We appreciate our passionate community of customers & users that have supported us over the past few years. ❤️
We thank you for understanding. Here’s some more information ⤵️
— Neeva (@Neeva) May 20, 2023
Two years ago, Neeva debuted an ad-free paid subscription-only search engine in the United States in order to demonstrate a search business model that made revenue without adverts and surveillance.
Six months later, the startup launched a free version of the search engine. Although the great majority of those customers were on a free plan, Neeva claimed that in the months that followed, it had accumulated more than 600,000 users.
“Contrary to popular belief, convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place,” the founders said.
The startup had to compete with Google’s billion-dollar deals signed to make the tech giant’s engine the default search engine on devices across the globe. These challenges, along with the new economic climate, made it difficult for the company to build a profitable firm in consumer search.
In an effort to expand, Neeva embarked on a swift international expansion operation in October, starting with Europe. Later, the company set out to completely reimagine the search experience with a new generative AI engine that merged many results and sources to provide a single response.
And while Neeva’s search engine seemed promising as users are getting tired of the number of ads and poor results they receive from Google, it still was not enough to keep the search engine going.
Neeva’s Future
As a result, Neeva’s search engine will be discontinued on June 2 and the company will now be shifting to a new area of focus, which is probably related to LLMs. Users will receive a refund for the unused part of their Neeva subscriptions from the company, and all user data will be deleted.
This past year we embarked on an ambitious effort to seamlessly blend LLMs into a search stack.
We are proud to be the first search engine to provide cited, real-time AI answers.
Looking at the road ahead, we realized we weren't on a path to creating a sustainable business.
— Neeva (@Neeva) May 20, 2023
“We are very thankful to our community and we are truly sorry that we are unable to continue to deliver the search engine that you desire and deserve,” the blog read.
However, Neeva’s future is not necessarily sealed by this. The company had previously hinted at some future monetization strategies outside paid subscriptions, including licensing agreements to power application searches inside companies. This might be a road it pursues more quickly now that it’s shutting down the primary component of its business.
Additionally, based on reports from The Information, Neeva is in the process of being acquired by a major cloud database provider, SnowFlake, which was in advanced talks to purchase the startup in order to assist in the creation of services for clients that wanted to deploy AI software.
Such an acquisition makes a lot of sense in the wake of the revelation that Neeva is shifting away from the consumer market.
Related articles: